It’s Finnegan

Keith Haring during a block party where he painted a mural on the handball court at P.S. 97 on the Lower East Side, August 1985.

I have a pretty vivid imagination. I was in the worst pain of my life, but I imagined that having my limbs torn off by a gator would probably hurt more. So I said “9”.

Turned out I had 6 simultaneous kidney stones. As anyone who’s ever had one can tell you, even a single kidney stone is monumentally painful- famously so.

I had 6 at once. 4 in one kidney, and 2 in the other.

When the doctor figured out what was wrong with me, he was floored that I hadn’t said “10”. Floored that I wasn’t screaming.

I told him about my imagination. He asked if I had chronic pain. I told him yeah, and that the reason I waited almost 10hrs to come to the hospital when I started was because “it felt like period cramps”.

This pain scale isn’t as useful, but it’s funny.

If you have chronic pain, your baseline may be 6. A good day may be 5.

Don't downplay that for the doctor. If your recent bad day was 8 or 9 - if you regularly have days that hit 8 or 9 - say so.

Part of the problem with doctors ignoring women's pain and people of color's pain, is that people who are disadvantaged are told to "suck it up" a lot, and they downgrade their baseline at 2-4 to zero.

Fuck that.